Open Subjects

English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods and the Virtue of Vulnerability

Studies of the republican legacy have proliferated in recent years, always to argue for a polity that cultivates the virtues, protections, and entitlements which foster the self's ability to simulate an invulnerable existence. James Kuzner's original new study of writing by Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell and Milton is the first to present a genealogy for the modern self in which its republican origins can be understood far more radically. In doing so, the study is also the first to draw radical and republican thought into sustained conversation, and to locate a republic for which vulnerability is, unexpectedly, as much what community has to offer as it is what community guards against. At a time when the drive to safeguard citizens has gathered enough momentum to justify almost any state action, Open Subjects questions whether vulnerability is the evil we so often believe it to be.

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Key features

First study to explore how early modern republican and contemporary radical thought connect with and complement each other

Traces the presence of English republicanism from the late sixteenth century to the late seventeenth

Analyses Renaissance literary texts in the context of classical, early modern, and contemporary political thought to add to how we think about selfhood in the present

Offers illuminating new readings of the place that English Renaissance figures occupy in histories of friendship, the public sphere, and selfhood more generally

Contents

AcknowledgementsPreface: Vulnerable Crests of Renaissance Selves1: Legacies of Republicanism, Histories of the Self2: 'Without Respect of Utility': Precarious Life and the Politics of Edmund Spenser's Legend of Friendship3: Unbuilding the City: Coriolanus, Titus, and the Forms of Openness4: 'That Transubstantiall solacisme': Andrew Marvell, Linguistic Vulnerability, and the Space of the Subject5: Habermas Goes to Hell: Pleasure, Public Reason, and the Republicanism of Paradise LostEpilogue: The Futures of Open SubjectsIndex.

About the Author

James Kuzner is Assistant Professor of English at Brown University.

Reviews

'This is revelatory work that pries open challenging literary texts to reveal human vulnerability as a central thematic and political element. Kuzner will change our thinking about the early modern subject.'

Barbara Correll, Cornell University

'Sensitive to ambient changes in social life, Kuzner's heroes of vulnerability, adrift in an unguarded existence where immune defenses have been turned off, hatch scripts for "worlds elsewhere," alternative modernities founded on pleasure, enjoyment, and the forms of openness they incite and sustain.'

Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life